Analyses or descriptions of the history of race relations (and cultural production) in what has been called Australia for about a hundred years, have frequently been informed by two orientations that might be simply categorised as the white blindfold and the black armband positions. In many cases, these two mindsets can be observed in other Western cultures although the interaction between them, and the society around them, gets played out differently in particular places at particular times.
This paper offers a look back over the rise of the visibility, and the rise as a category, of Asian Australian fiction from the beginning of the 1990s, and especially in the twenty-first century, and some of the main questions that have been asked of it by its producers, and its readers, critics, commentators and the awarders of prizes. It focuses upon women writers. The trope of "border crossings"-both actual and in the mind, was central in the late-twentieth century to much feminist, Marxist, postcolonial and race-cognisant cultural commentary and critique, and the concepts of hybridity, diaspora, whiteness, the exotic, postcolonising and (gendered) cultural identities were examined and deployed. In the "paranoid nation" of the twenty-first century, there is a new orientation on the part of governments towards ideas of-if not quite an imminent Yellow
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